Yesterday morning I was watching a review by Phil Busardo at Taste Your Juice. Reading through the comments, one comment asked “Phil. are you finding the hit to strong with 12 mg on those .3 ohm coils?” Of course the device was an unregulated restricted lung device so I responded no that that’s how I vape with 18mg juice. It got me to thinking on how I went from smoking analogs MTL (mouth to lung) to DL (direct lung). I am not a pot smoker so DL was completely foreign to me. All of the earlier devices I tried (cigalikes,evod etc etc etc) I strictly vaped MTL, it was not until I got my first regulated box mod (Kanger 50w subtank mini kit) that I started doing DL hits. So I decided to dig it out of mothballs and try it again. For this experiment I bummed a cigarette from a friend smoking it MTL as one normally would then I would take the same MTL puff on my old Kanger. Then it all started coming back to me. The kanger put out a tiny wisp of vapor, not even on par with a cigalike. I had the subtank set up MTL so I took several drags in succession letting up on the button in between, the vapor was a little better but not by much. Then while still set up MTL I took a DL hit like I would now. The throat hit was massive and I started coughing. Oh yea now I remember. The first DL hit I took on this device was with a 27mg tobacco juice that was 100% PG, VG wasn’t out yet. So as you old vapers can imagine I coughed a lung up. I coughed so hard tears came to my eyes. I soon learned that by opening up the air and reducing the nicotine content I could bring the throat hit down to a tolerable level. Of course with the introduction of VG I had even more control.

Why did I have this experience? Well the early regulated box mods had an extremely long delay, if I remember right it was close to a half of a second, added to that the sub ohm tanks had beefier coils then the cigalikes and egos which required a longer ramp up to temperature. So while still in MTL configuration I held the button down until I heard the old familiar sizzle and then took a mouth to MTL, ah that’s it much better. So I took the old subtank off the Kbox and put it on my Thinkvape Finder and tried just doing a MTL. It was much better then the Kbox but it wasn’t quite there. Even though there was practically no delay there still was a slight ramp up so I found that if I took a few primer puffs and then a MTL, bingo that did it. So for the last day I have been swapping back and forth between restricted DL and MTL. I found that on fruity flavors I could not taste any differences. But on what I like to call darker flavors like my all day vape, Private Stock by Innevape (Hazelnut, butterscotch and Caramel) some of the flavors where slightly muted.

With this new knowledge am I going to go back to MTL? Probably not, I have to make a conscious effort to take the primer puffs and the difference isn’t drastic enough to put in that effort. But it’s things that you forget during the journey that just might help the newbees out so I thought I’d share the experience. While the MTL experience is closer to smoking the old analogs, it is not a one to one experience. In order to get a good MTL you have to either hold the button down for the preheat or take primer puffs like smoking a pipe. I just watched Phil and Mike do reviews on exactly the same tank and they both take primer puffs. Something I never thought of in my early days of sub ohming.